A few years ago, Matt Bruenig pointed out that Nobody Is On Twitter. Since then, research (Pew in particular) has given us much better data than we had at the time, giving us a much better picture of just how tiny Twitter's audience actually is. Since I was poking through some of it today, I thought I might as well post a few of the more interesting numbers I came across. First, on how often people use Twitter:

These numbers are based on Pew's latest survey on social media use, as well as reporting on dead accounts by PC Mag. The baseline number Matt mentioned in 2015 - 23% - is pretty close to the 24% we see here, but once we break it down it becomes clear that this number is significantly inflated.

Most US adults with Twitter accounts (24%) aren't online every day (13%), and in fact, 44% of that first number may never use their account at all. That leaves about 13% of US adults who are Active Posters.

People who are online every day - call them True Posters - account for only 11% of all US adults.

Extremely Online Posters - the people who, intuitively, prove most of our content - only account for 6% of the US adult population.

Even these numbers, however, overstate things: not everyone, it turns out, uses Twitter to talk about the news:

One recent survey shows that only about 11% of the population ever gets their news from Twitter.

Among respondents who ever use social media to get the news there is also significant variation in consumption: for instance, 30% of that group say that they "hardly ever" get their news from social media. If these trends holds for Twitter, then it is probably a significant source of news for something closer to 3-8% of US adults.

This, I think, is a much more realistic assessment of Twitter's news reach: bring together all of the blue check journalists and unverified posters, the sinister operatives and the doe-eyed normies, the Pepe teens and the Gritty teens, the #TCOT grandpas and rose emojis - put them all together, and you are reaching a single-digit percentage of US adults, somewhere between 3-8%.